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“Well,” he said, “I’m very
glad to have the privilege of your acquaintance; and,
if I may say so, you ’ave—­you ’ave
my ’earty sympathy. Good-day.”

The door once shut behind her, Gyp took a long breath
and walked swiftly away. Her cheeks were burning;
and, with a craving for protection, she put up her
sunshade. But the girl’s white face came
up again before her, and the sound of her words:

“Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, I wish I was dead!
I do!”

XVI

Gyp walked on beneath her sunshade, making unconsciously
for the peace of trees. Her mind was a whirl
of impressions—­Daphne Wing’s figure
against the door, Mr. Wagge’s puggy grey-bearded
countenance, the red pampas-grass, the blue bowl, Rosek’s
face swooping at her, her last glimpse of her baby
asleep under the trees!

She reached Kensington Gardens, turned into that walk
renowned for the beauty of its flowers and the plainness
of the people who frequent it, and sat down on a bench.
It was near the luncheon-hour; nursemaids, dogs,
perambulators, old gentlemen—­all were hurrying
a little toward their food. They glanced with
critical surprise at this pretty young woman, leisured
and lonely at such an hour, trying to find out what
was wrong with her, as one naturally does with beauty—­bow
legs or something, for sure, to balance a face like
that! But Gyp noticed none of them, except now
and again a dog which sniffed her knees in passing.
For months she had resolutely cultivated insensibility,
resolutely refused to face reality; the barrier was
forced now, and the flood had swept her away.
“Proceedings!” Mr. Wagge had said.
To those who shrink from letting their secret affairs
be known even by their nearest friends, the notion
of a public exhibition of troubles simply never comes,
and it had certainly never come to Gyp. With
a bitter smile she thought: ’I’m
better off than she is, after all! Suppose I
loved him, too? No, I never—­never—­want
to love. Women who love suffer too much.’

She sat on that bench a long time before it came into
her mind that she was due at Monsieur Harmost’s
for a music lesson at three o’clock. It
was well past two already; and she set out across the
grass. The summer day was full of murmurings
of bees and flies, cooings of blissful pigeons, the
soft swish and stir of leaves, and the scent of lime
blossom under a sky so blue, with few white clouds
slow, and calm, and full. Why be unhappy?
And one of those spotty spaniel dogs, that have broad
heads, with frizzy topknots, and are always rascals,
smelt at her frock and moved round and round her,
hoping that she would throw her sunshade on the water
for him to fetch, this being in his view the only reason
why anything was carried in the hand.

She found Monsieur Harmost fidgeting up and down the
room, whose opened windows could not rid it of the
smell of latakia.